We recently completed our longest contract to date, with a local jewelry retailer. This was an eighteen-month job with two of our resources. They deployed an e-commerce Web store for one of their brands. Our job was to integrate all of their back-end and third-party systems with the Java-based Web application. The integration platform that was selected was Mule ESB.

Mule was very new, at the time. We were working with a pre-GA release prior to the production deployment. Although there were several issues with the software, and the learning curve was longer than expected, Mule turned out to be a very solid solution and continues to manage their communication. Some of the services components were built to manage order processing and fulfillmen (both REST-based Web services), integration with their existing POS subsystem (FTP), credit card processing (SOAP-based Web services), internal credit checks (proprietary network messaging protocol), and direct JDBC queries through JNDI resources.

Like most integration projects, we worked with many business units in order to gather requirements and complete integration testing. One of our strengths is that we communicate well with both technical and business units. We bridge the human gap, much like Mule bridges the technology gaps. Some of the departments that we interfaced with were store operations, accounting, IT, and distribution.

The first year in production, the Web store and ESB exceeded expectations by approximately 20% in sales volume. This is truly one of our best success stories.